But it feels so real…

There is “chairness”. Chairness “is an abstraction, an ideal” (Gibson 1). It is the broad idea of a chair. When you hear chair, what do you think? What is it that makes a chair a chair? Must it have four legs? A seat? A back? Is a stool a chair? 

There is a chair. It is there, you can use all of your senses to feel it, touch it, smell it, see it, and hear it when you knock on it. The chair is there, it is reality.

Then, there is a painting of a chair. According to Plato’s example in the Republic (Bk 10) this painting “is twice removed and hence it is” a sham chair, a simulated chair, a virtual chair (Gibson 1).

According to Plato, the carpenter who made the chair “would be allowed in his utopia, the painter would not” (Gibson 1).

There is telephone-ness. There is a telephone. Then, there is talking on the telephone. Gibson states that the conversation takes place in the “matrix”. This is an example of cyberspace: of being in your own reality and having a virtual experience, something not real in the sense that the telephone is there or in the sense that the chair is there. 

Going beyond this, there is Jaron Lanier’s idea of virtual reality (VR). This is “a matter of technology that can create the illusion of actually being in another possible world while remaining in the actual world” (Gibson 2). One example might be a flight simulator.

The difference between cyberspace and virtual reality? In virtual reality you can actually believe you are in it. When talking on the phone, you do not feel like you are in the matrix. While your body is in a flight simulator, you mind is flying a real plane. The simulator is “telling me–creating the illusion for me– that my body is there also” (Gibson 3).

Gibson further states that you have not just one “reality”, (the one which contains a chair and a telephone), but rather, many realities. You have the “consensual hallucination” such as the telephone conversation and similarly “consensual reality”. But in addition, you have “designer realities” and “electronic LSD.” Getting DSL in your home is, many people joke, getting LSD in your home. It’s a simple palindrome” (Gibson 3). 

Plato and Aristotle agree that this “illusion of being elsewhere is not good” (Gibson 3). I agree with these great philosophers in that I think the convincing nature of these false realities can be dangerous to society. Games including gun warfare can seem so real that a child may believe they are actually in the game. They kill a character in the game and yet the same character shows up again when they lose and play again. Yet when a child takes this into his or her real life, and a shooting occurs, the person shot does not usually come back to life. There is no reset button in reality. (Incidents like this have happened on multiple occasions.) People can get so caught up in virtual reality it becomes intertwined with true reality. 

A sense of imagination can be part of childhood, believing in myths and fairytales involving other worlds/realities. And yet once this becomes realistic and they are truly able to go there through VR electronics, imagination changes from something that was more of a cyberspace reality (they knew it was not real) and becomes a virtual reality (where it is so close to real life it basically is real).

There is a chair. It is there, you can use all of your senses to feel it, touch it, smell it, see it, and hear it when you knock on it. And yet you have no other proof that the chair exists other than your senses. Therefore, if virtual reality provides every sense that reality does, how will we be able to decipher what is real and what is virtual?